Sole Survivor td-72 Page 6

  "Who told you that?" asked the guard in a suspicious voice.

  "Cheeta Ching," said Remo, running sensitive fingers along the edge of the electronically controlled gate. At the touch of a button from within the guardhouse, the steel-mesh fence would roll aside on a track. The fence would not stop a speeding truck, but it would slow it down long enough for the gate guards to splinter the cab with their automatic rifles.

  "That right?" said the guard. "She a friend of yours?"

  "No. I heard it on her program."

  "Shit!" said the guard. "That wasn't supposed to get out. "

  "Well, it is out and I'd like to see the man, if you don't mind." Remo smiled politely because he knew that smiling automatically sent calming signals to an opponent that put him off his guard.

  "You're not a relative."

  "How do you know?"

  "If that guy was related to me, I wouldn't want anyone to know it. Ergo, you're not a relative."

  "Nobody seems to want him," Remo suggested confidentially.

  "Yeah, they threw him out of Centralia first," said the guard. "They gave him a cover identity, got him a job and everything. He had more fake history that somebody in the Federal Witness Protection program. But the fool hadda wear that stupid fisherman's hat of his. Everybody recognized him. Damn near ran him out of town on a rail. So they sent him to Snohomish. That lasted all of two days. He was only a day in McMurray. They hadn't got him into his motel room when it was all over the six-o'clock news. They hadda send in an armored car to keep him from being lynched. They even threw him out of Nooksack. Hell, they'd let anybody live in Nooksack. Not Barn, though."

  "So they brought him back here," said Remo.

  "What else could they do? Every time they tried to parole him, folks rose up like a tidal wave. And if the people didn't, the city councils did. Can't say I blame them. You know what he done?"

  "Yes," said Remo grimly. "I know what he did."

  "Then why're you here, buddy? You don't look like the Welcome Wagon."

  "I'm here to kill him," said Remo matter-of-factly. The guard stared at Remo through the wire mesh. He tilted his blue cap back off his shiny forehead.

  "Not a bad idea. You know, they gave the guy a house trailer. Set it up on the grounds. He's not a prisoner anymore. He's free to come and go. Acts like he owns the place. Sets my blood to boiling."

  "How about opening the gate?" Remo asked.

  "You know the warden lets him have women visitors," the guard said slowly. "Hookers, of course. No self-respecting woman would be around him."

  "That's insane," said Remo.

  "The warden figures if you don't let the hookers in to see him, he'll go off and attack some girl and it'll start all over again. Only this time the warden will be blamed. Our warden, he's a practical man."

  "He's a fool," said Remo.

  "That, too."

  "The gate," said Remo.

  "Look, buddy. You got balls coming up to the gate like this and stating your intentions, righteous as they may be, but I'll lose my job if I let you in."

  "So don't let me in. Just look the other way while I climb over the fence."

  The guard laughed. "That ain't just razor wire up there, pal. It's electrified. The combination will slice and fry you like fast-food bacon."

  Remo looked up. Barbed wire coiled along the stone wall of the prison perimeter in big double loops. Double strands of electrified wire ran through the loops. A man climbing the smooth face of the wall could not top the wire without entangling himself or touching the electrified line.

  "Why don't you get yourself a cup of coffee and let me worry about that?" Remo offered.

  The guard considered briefly. "Tell you what. If you can get in on your own, I'll look the other way. But if you're spotted on the grounds, I gotta do what I gotta do to stop you." He patted his automatic shotgun for emphasis.

  "Fair enough," said Remo. "And thanks."

  "It's your funeral," the guard said, turning his back.

  "It's someone's," agreed Remo.

  The guard returned to the gatehouse and busied himself with a clipboard. Every once in a while he could not resist peering through the glass enclosure to see if the skinny guy with the deep, empty eyes was anywhere in sight. He was not.

  But the front gate was open.

  Not wide, just enough for a man to slip through. The guard looked at his control panel. It was dead. The switch controlling the electrical gate was not open as it should have been with the gate like that. He tried closing the gate electrically. The switch was inoperative. The guard went running out.

  The gate was frozen. It would not roll free.

  He knew it was the work of the man at the gate. But he could not understand how. It would have taken superhuman strength to force the closed gate open even a few feet. It would have been easier if the power had been cut. But the man with the thick wrists could not have done that either. All power sources were inside Graystone Prison, not outside. And a man attempting to penetrate the prison would hardly sneak in and disable the power just to go back to the gate and open it.

  Unless of course the man had disabled the power so he could get through the gate on the way out.

  The guard knew one thing. He could not close the gate and he could not ignore the security problem it presented. He hit an alarm switch.

  Sirens wailed all over Graystone. A squad of guards came running on the double.

  The guard met them halfway. "I think we may have had a break," he said uncertainly. "The main gate is jammed open."

  A swift search of the prison revealed that no prisoners were missing. The gate was jammed because the generator that powered it was disabled. According to the electrician's report, the gate had been wrenched open with such force that the mechanism blew out. No one could imagine how the truck that had done it had not also destroyed the gate as well.

  Finally, hours later, when the gate was again operative someone noticed that Dexter Barn was missing. Because he was not technically a prisoner, there was no immediate concern. Barn was free to come and go on his own recognizance. But it was strange that no one had seen him leave.

  "He'll be back," the warden said confidently.

  "I wouldn't count on that," said the gate guard, who refused to explain his remark.

  After forcing the main gate to roll back two feet, Remo Williams squeezed in through the space and hugged the wall, moving where the shadows of the dying sun were strongest. He was for all intents and purposes invisible to the guards in the corner turrets. They were more concerned with the sky anyway, where the modern prison escape method, the hijacked helicopter, could be seen coming.

  Remo preferred more traditional methods.

  He found the house trailer parked on the basketball court. It was new, clean, and it looked comfortable. Remo could almost imagine himself living in one, and wondered, for the first time, why he hadn't asked Smith for a house trailer years ago. Working for CURE had demanded that he not live in any one place very long, but a mobile home would have solved that problem.

  Remo shrugged inwardly and moved on the home. The idea was too little, too late.

  Remo knocked on the trailer door. He had decided on the direct approach. It usually unnerved his targets. The man who poked his weather-beaten face out the trailer door did not look like a man who would rape a thirteen-year-old girl, and when he was done, remove her arms and legs with a fire ax and then leave her for dead in an abandoned house. He wore a frayed checked shirt. A pale blue fisherman's hat sat crumpled on his head, throwing his watery blue eyes into shadow.

  "What can I do for you, young feller?"

  "You're Dexter Barn?"

  "You tell me."

  "You're Dexter Barn," said Remo solemnly. The man cackled in his face. He was about sixty, but he looked as worn as an eighty-year-old. Five years in prison had done that. But five years did not seem like much of a punishment for a man who had ravaged an innocent girl's life. No punishment seemed appropriate.
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  "I understand you're having trouble readjusting to life on the outside," Remo said solicitously.

  "Not me," said Dexter Barn. "It's them others. They don't want me."

  "Can you blame them?" Remo asked. He had thought he would feel something facing the man. He had felt anger when he first heard the news story about the rapist's plight. He had felt horror when he learned that the man had been pardoned after only five years. But the man did not look like a vicious rapist. He looked like anybody. He might have been an old salt sitting in the sun on a Gloucester wharf, or an Idaho dirt farmer, or any number of other mundane things.

  "Well, I don't know," said Dexter Barn. "I paid my debt to society. I deserve to be left alone. People don't understand. A man just wants a home of his own. It really hurts to be spit upon and called names. It cuts deep, son."

  "Almost as deep as an ax," said Remo bitterly.

  "I feel for that little girl," said Dexter Barn, shaking his head dourly. "I really do. I saw her at the trial. In a wheelchair, with hooks for arms and all that. Terrible pity. It would have been a better thing if she had died, you know that? A better thing."

  Remo looked at the man. Something cold and terrible welled up inside his stomach. He repressed it. Anger, Chiun had always said, had no place in an assassin's art. No place at all. It robbed the judgment, and led to mistakes.

  Remo swallowed once. When he spoke, his voice was still a croak. "I've decided," he said.

  "Decided what, young feller?"

  "Decided that killing's too good for you."

  Dexter Barn recoiled from Remo's words. He tried to slam the sheet-metal door in Remo's hard face, but Remo's hand stopped it easily.

  Dexter Barn backed into his comfortable mobile home while Remo Williams followed him in, his eyes as dead and uncaring as the heads of old nails.

  "I just want a place to call home," Dexter Barn pleaded.

  "You got it," promised Remo, paralyzing the man with an openhanded thrust to his wattled throat.

  The clerk at the shipping agency at first refused the crate.

  "Can't accept it," he told Remo Williams, who had walked into the agency with a large wooden crate slung easily under one arm.

  "Why not?" demanded Remo.

  "Regulations. That package is too large for its weight. I can tell by the easy way you carried it in here." Remo deposited the crate on the counter. The counter shook, rattling the floor and the clerk's leg bones so hard his teeth chattered.

  "Oh," said the clerk, running his fingers over the edges of the crate appraisingly. "Seems heavy enough."

  He looked at Remo's exposed biceps wonderingly. They looked awfully skinny.

  "I want to send this to Iran," Remo said. "Where in Iran?"

  "It doesn't matter. Wherever the Ayatollah lives, I guess."

  "I see," said the clerk, pulling out a preprinted international shipping form. "What are the contents?"

  "Garbage," said Remo Williams, hoping that Dexter Barn would not wake up until the crate was well on its way.

  "Garbage?"

  "Yeah. I'm sending garbage to Iran to protest their government's terrorist policies."

  The clerk grinned appreciatively. "I understand that. We had a few of those after the last hijacking. Okay, now we just need one more thing."

  "What's that?"

  "A return address."

  Remo frowned.

  "Look," explained the clerk. "I'd like to help you, but without a return address, this thing will end up back here if the Iranians refuse it."

  "I see your point," said Remo. He considered giving the man the address of his former boss, Harold W. Smith, but decided that even Smitty did not deserve to be stuck with such a package. After some thought, Remo came up with a solution.

  "The return address is Tripoli, Libya," he said.

  "That'll do," said the clerk, grinning as he marked the crate.

  After Remo had paid the man, he started out the door, thinking that he had forgotten some little detail. He ducked back into the building.

  "By the way, how long will it take to reach Iran?" he asked.

  "About two or three weeks."

  "Good. Thanks," said Remo. He was very pleased that he had guessed right. There was just about enough canned dog food in the crate to keep Dexter Barn alive until he reached his new home, Iran or Libya. Still, Remo couldn't get rid of the idea that he had forgotten some minor detail.

  At the airport, they stopped Remo as he went through the metal detector.

  "Please empty your pockets, sir," a woman guard requested firmly.

  Remo turned his pockets inside out. They were, empty. He went through the detector again. It buzzed again. The guard ran a metal detector wand up and down Remo's body. It beeped near Remo's waist.

  "I'll have to confiscate this," said a guard, plucking a can opener from Remo's belt.

  "I knew I forgot something," Remo said sheepishly.

  Chapter 6

  If the magazine had not fallen out of Earl Armalide's back pocket just as the wall splintered his favorite rifle, he would have died horribly.

  At first, Earl Armalide did not realize why the wails had suddenly stopped closing in on him. His fear-frozen mind only registered the welcome fact that the walls had locked in place. He would have savored the moment, but he was screaming at the top of his lungs.

  He had been screaming almost from the moment he first stepped aboard the Soviet shuttle Yuri Gagarin and unslung his high-powered Colt Commando rifle. "Suck lead, Commie bastards," he had yelled.

  But he found the shuttle's lower deck empty. The cockpit was empty too. So was the upper deck. He moved carefully from section to section, hunched low, his rifle pointing from his hip.

  He used the classic room-to-room fighting tactics that was a guerrilla specialty. He would bob his head into the next section too fast for anyone to get a clear shot at him, and if no one fired, he jumped in, hitting the floor in a snap-roll and coming to his feet, spinning in place, finger on the trigger, yelling, "Die, godless heathens!"

  Every time Earl entered a new compartment, he found himself staring at bare walls. There was no trace of a crew or captives.

  Eventually he worked his way to the rear of the ship and its huge cargo bay area. It, too, was vacant.

  Earl Armalide was very unhappy. Fate had handed him a solution to all his problems-not to mention a golden opportunity to pump bullets into Russian bodies without any legal consequences. But there was nobody to shoot. It struck him as very unfair. Like income tax.

  Earl considered shooting the big silvery globe that nestled in the cargo bay, on the theory that, if he couldn't kill Russians, he could at least shoot up some Russian technology. But he decided against it. The bullets were bound to ricochet off the bulkhead walls, catching him in his own crossfire.

  It was a disheartened Earl Armalide who stepped back into the airlock section. He noticed suddenly that the other door, leading back into the lower deck, had silently closed.

  Earl tried that door, without success. While he fought with it, the other door sealed itself and the walls began to close in on him.

  That was when Earl stopped bellowing guerrilla slogans and just sat on the floor with his hands over his eyes and his lungs working at top volume. It was during those gyrations that the magazine fell out.

  The magazine fell cover-up, showing the title, Survivalist's Monthly. Abruptly a flat metallic voice emanating from the walls asked him about it.

  "I am unfamiliar with the term 'survivalist,' " the voice said. "Please explain."

  Earl heard the emotionless voice boom over his own screaming. It was very loud.

  "What?" he said, taking his hands away from his eyes.

  "I requested that you define the term 'survivalist.' " Earl noticed the magazine. He also noticed that the walls had stopped moving.

  "Me. I'm a survivalist. An expert survivalist. Who are you?"

  "I am a survival machine, Is that like a survivalist?"

  "Yo
u're a machine?"

  "Do not be so surprised. You are also a machine."

  "The hell I am," said Earl Armalide indignantly.

  "You are a machine of meat and bone and plasma fluids. I am a machine of metal and plastic and lubricants."

  "I am a human being."

  "You are a meat machine infested with parasitic organisms such as bacteria, without which you could not function. But I do not hold that against you. I am interested in this concept called survivalism."

  "Where are you?" asked Earl Armalide, looking around.

  "All around you. I am what you see."

  "You're a wall?"

  "I am this craft. It is my present form. I assimilated it because I could not reenter earth's atmosphere without burning up. Becoming this craft enabled me to survive. Surviving is my prime directive."

  "We got something in common there," said Earl Armalide, standing up. He looked around for something to face. The walls were blank. "Can you see me?"

  "The control panel," the voice stated.

  Earl looked. The door control lights blinked. Earl looked closer. One of the buttons was not a button, but a cold blue eye. Humanlike, but glassy and unblinking like a cat's-eye marble, it followed his every gesture. "That you?" asked Earl.

  "I can assume any form I choose, and I possess the power to manipulate any form I assume."

  "You're not Russian?"

  "No."

  "Are you, like, a Martian?"

  "No. "

  "What are you?"

  "I have told you, I am a survival machine. I have enemies who desire my destruction and I am interested in this new concept of survivalism, which must have come into being while I was in outer space, for I have never heard of it."

  "Well, turning into a Russky space shuttle and dropping down on New York City ain't the way to go about surviving," Earl Armalide retorted. "If anything, you just collected yourself a new batch of enemies. They're gonna have you surrounded by tanks any minute now. You know what a tank is?"

  "A military vehicle capable of ejecting explosive projectiles. "

  "Those ain't the words I would have used, but you got the general concept," said Earl Armalide.

  "Tell me, survivalist, what would you do were you in my position? How would you use your expert skills to survive this situation?"